How many on their deathbeds wished they'd spent more time at the office - or watching TV? The answer is, No one.
Stephen CoveyRead
Keep in mind that you are always saying "no" to something. If it isn't to the apparent and urgent things in your life, it is probably to the most fundamental, highly important things.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Every decision we make involves trade-offs, often sacrificing important things for less urgent matters.
In this quote, Stephen Covey emphasizes the importance of our choices and the inherent 'no' that comes with each decision. While we may often focus on saying 'no' to immediate tasks or distractions, we must also recognize that those choices can lead us to neglect more significant and meaningful opportunities in life, stressing the need for mindful prioritization.
Themes
DecisionPrioritizationTrade-OffsMindfulnessImportance
In practice
Example use cases
During a team meeting when discussing project priorities.
More from Stephen Covey
All quotes βIf you want to have a more pleasant, cooperative teenager, be a more understanding, empathic, consistent, loving parent. If you want to have more freedom, more latitude in your job, be a more responsible, a more helpful, a more contributing employee.
Stephen CoveyRead
Listen with your eyes for feelings.
Stephen CoveyRead
If we live out of our memory, we're tied to the past and to that which is finite. When we live out of our imagination, _x000D_ we're tied to that which is infinite.
Stephen CoveyRead
Synergy is the highest activity of life; it creates new untapped alternatives; it values and exploits the mental, emotional, and psychological differences between people.
Stephen CoveyRead
Don't argue for other people's weaknesses. Don't argue for your own. When you make a mistake, admit it, correct it, and learn from it / immediately.
Stephen CoveyRead
Similar quotes
You say I have the most wicked face of any woman. You say my hair is like the serpent locks of Medusa, that my eyes have the cruel cunning of Borgia, that my mouth is the mouth of the sinister scheming Delilah, that my hands are like the talons of a Circe or the blood-bathing Elizabeth Bathory. And then you ask me of my soulβyou wish to know if it is reflected in my face.
Theda BaraRead
I don't know whether war is an interlude during peace, or peace is an interlude during war.
Georges ClemenceauRead
To work for libertarianism - to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual - used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
Robert Anton WilsonRead
It was the same way with silence. This was more than silence. A deaf person can feel vibrations. Here there was nothing to feel.
Madeleine L'EngleRead
Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality. It is impossible to find a hygienist who does not debase his theory of the healthful with a theory of the virtuous. ... The aim of medicine is surely not to make men virtuous; it is to safeguard them from the consequences of their vices.
H. L. MenckenRead
Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both of their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.
Paolo GiordanoRead